On Epistles and Sea Change (Epistolary Wednesday),

As much as I’ve loved our themed epistles on Wednesdays, I’m starting to think that every blog post is an epistle. And every novel, every essay, every poem for that matter. After all, if it’s not written in a diary, then it’s written for an audience, from one person to many others, meaning, maybe I won't identify a fictionalized recipient every week. But sometimes I will. So: here’s me giving notice that Wednesdays are epistolary by nature, whether or not I’m writing to you, my husband, daughters, Jesus, Obama, or the Duggar family. Yes?

But about sea changes. I’m not really a water girl, and probably shouldn’t talk like water words come easily to me, but sea change makes me think of sailors and wet rope and a stern watch on the ocean. It’s the phrase that ran through my mind a few months ago in the middle of weeks of restlessness. Have you ever felt change coming like you feel a storm rolling in? Maybe we don’t know how loud or wild the storm will be, but we know it’s coming nonetheless. And we sit on our perches with cold anticipation and a thrill in our stomachs because we know things are about to Get Interesting.

Well that’s where I’m at, and I’ve been here before, watching for sea change. Sometimes the waters rise up and roil so slowly you can’t tell exactly when it begins. Other times, it’s a flash of lightening and a darkening sky in an instant. I’m not a boater, like I said, but what I hear is that we can get farther if we cooperate with the wind and hike our sails to catch it when it blows.

Sunday night, a small group of friends and I met and we asked each other the question about what was next in each other’s lives. Where did we feel God calling us, where did we think we were going? Funny to find out, most of us in the room were feeling a sea change too—facing decisions about babies and moves and jobs and settling or not settling down. And then we prayed that we’d catch the wind of the Spirit wherever it was leading, that we’d have our sails up at the right moment so we could move along with it.

And then we each went out into a wet and icy November night, to chilly cars, and slick streets, to the next morning's alarm clocks and waking children and meetings and phone calls and family chaos and drama. Keeping our sails up takes some diligence in the midst of the everydayness of our jam-packed lives. It means readying ourselves when we're not really ready for change, when we don't know what change looks like, and when we don't know if we really want it. And then, despite our diligence to hoist the sails, there may be the impossible absence of wind. At least for a time. And there we live: ready but not ready, ready but mystified, ready and going nowhere--all while we try to live like responsible, loving human beings--taking out the trash, greeting our neighbors across the snow-covered yards, praying, giving, blending hemp seed and fruit smoothies for our children's breakfast, and, every once in a while, checking on that cold and unmoving winter sky as it's framed by the window.

For the Modern-Day Kittys and Lydias, (Epistolary Wednesday)

For You Modern-Day Kittys and Lydias,

I’m addressing you metaphorically, of course, as Austen’s characters are merely that. But, I find no better way to warn you, Girl, of the downside to obsessively fixating on potential matches and romance all around you in the seventh grade. You remember, don’t you, how Lydia’s obsession with “the officers” and her mother’s relentless matchmaking led to shame and embarrassment for her whole family, how she threw caution to the wind and put undeserved faith in Wickham, who was interested in sex and money and very little in Lydia? In Austen’s days, of course, Lydia was old enough to marry, but hitched and pregnant is not where I want you or any of your friends at sixteen. Need a contemporary warning? Lorelei Gilmore (albeit with the worst parents on earth). Pregnant at 16. Yes, it all turned out all right after she lived in a garden shed with her daughter and was estranged from her family for many years. It’s good now, but might I remind you of the years her romance cost her?

All this is to say, it concerns me that you take so much pleasure in matchmaking your friends at the junior high school dance, that you are “so happy for” the “couple” who has just placed tentative hands on one another’s shoulders and hips for the first time in their lives after only glancing at each other fearfully in the hallway for the first two months of school. You’re happy and squeally for them--as if they’ve just announced an engagement, a wedding, a baby. And this leaves me unsettled and wondering what on earth you think this means—two children swaying together for three minutes in a gymnasium. I hope you know this is not the end of their story. That they will (99.99999% likely) “break up” in the next two weeks, that their hearts will get broken over and over again in the context of this not-quite-real world of global studies tests, bus rides, field trips, hall passes, AP exams, choir concerts and track meets. They might do things they wished they hadn’t.

Sweetheart, some of these kids will take this "romance" in the serious way that you seem to be taking it--up to the next level. You should know: there will be pregnancies you will not see evidence of. There will be diseases you hear nothing about. Some of your friends, too, will end up used and abused by other children who haven't learned anything about real love. There will be appointments and counseling and parents tearing their hair out and crying because these poor parents are strapped with the job of helping these not-quite-or-even-close-to adults navigate adult-like decisions and adult-like hormones and adult-like bodies.

Please accept my kind but urgent rebuke. How about we celebrate romance later? Let’s pull out our dancing shoes when these children understand that romance is as temporary as the cold, solid ice pop you get handed at the Fourth of July parade. What seems so solid and dependable in romance can liquefy in the wrong climates. Let’s laugh and smile when these creatures learn how to own their choices and take responsibility for their lives. Let’s do the Macarena when they learn selflessness, because that's what helps love last; it's what gives romance a fighting chance at re-forming once it's become a puddly mess. Let’s do the Cha Cha Slide and the Chicken when they’ve learned how to suffer long for someone else, when they know how true love hopes and waits and defers and hangs in there and doesn’t give up. Okay, sweetheart? Okay? Okay??

***Heather Weber is the author of Dear Boy,: An Epistolary Memoir

"Dear Boy, is a brilliant and unusual memoir of distance and absence--the absence of a beloved brother from his sister's life and the absence of healthy mothering that, over the years, drove brother and sister apart. Weber deftly shifts point of view so that, piece by piece, readers gather the sum of confusion and loss. Yet there is so much love and forgiveness in the narrator that, in a way, each character is redeemed. I'm moved by this life, this telling of it." --Fleda Brown, author of Driving with Dvorak.

Dear Pastor's Kid, (Epistolary Wednesday)

Dear Pastor’s Kid,

You’ve heard the stories about Jesus and Abraham since you were in diapers. You know that God is Good and Jesus Loves You because The Bible Tells You So. You’ve sung the Sunday school songs, performed in the Christmas programs, and just because you’re you, have corrected the theology of the younger ones who wanted to know if angels and Santa were in cahoots, if the Easter Bunny was as real as Jesus. Also, you take science seriously; you wrestled with creation theory, held intelligent conversations about how the theories of evolution and God-as-Orignator might somehow fit together like a puzzle, and not be at odds as so many people seem to think they are.

And you know so much about the Bible—names, spouses, plot twists, dates—that I’m surprised to hear you casually recounting the stories. You don’t know it all (how could you; how could anyone?), but I’m sort of impressed. You’re invested, in other words, in figuring this whole God-and-the-Bible thing out.

But, you’re also worn out on God Stuff.

When I suggest reading the Bible out loud to you and your sister, or when there’s some new thing for kids at church who are your age, you'll sigh and say, “Do we have to? I already know everything there is to know about this stuff.” And sometimes, when you come home from youth group, or you hear about a church event other kids are going to, you sigh and say, “I’m just gonna feel guilty because they’ll tell me I should be telling people about Jesus. And I just don’t want to.” And not wanting to makes you feel like a very bad person.

I will commiserate with you because--listen--the last thing I want for you (or anyone who loves Jesus) is to feel like you have to perform for Him. It's not what anyone has meant to convey to you, but somehow the message has gotten scrambled over all these years.

Here's the problem I've started to clarify: So much knowledge about God, so much immersion in “church” and the Bible to the exclusion of knowing God with your heart just as much, is counterintuitive if not downright damaging. All of those facts and figures and names and verses could trick one into thinking that they have this God-thing all figured out, that this mass of information is all there is to gain. 

That kind of knowledge is dangerous, love, because like a vaccine, it so easily inoculates us against the most important things--it works against our Searching, against our Hunger and Finding Out With Our Hearts and our Souls who God really is. Those things, dear one, are what I most want you to inherit--not the satisfaction of memorizing verses and references, not a sense that you have "arrived" in church-land culture.

If taking back some of the Vacation Bible Schools, some of the forced Sunday school attendance when you were just not "into it" meant opening up your curiosity and encouraging your questions, I might do it. And even though it's not my first choice, that is why I'm letting you go to the junior high dance and giggle in a corner with your two girlfriends rather than make you go to the church youth conference. Maybe--and this is my prayer--your spiritual hunger will grow best in an echo-y gymnasium full of shy seventh graders. Maybe you will search for God right alongside bowls of Chex mix, cups of fruit punch, and Pharrell Williams through the sound system.

***Heather Weber is the author of Dear Boy,: An Epistolary Memoir.

"Dear Boy, is a brilliant and unusual memoir of distance and absence--the absence of a beloved brother from his sister's life and the absence of healthy mothering that, over the years, drove brother and sister apart. Weber deftly shifts point of view so that, piece by piece, readers gather the sum of confusion and loss. Yet there is so much love and forgiveness in the narrator that, in a way, each character is redeemed. I'm moved by this life, this telling of it." --Fleda Brown, author of Driving with Dvorak.

Dear Tiny Road Trippers (Epistolary Wednesday)

On Wednesdays, I write letters.

Dear Tiny Road Trippers,

Preschool closed down last week. It’s you and me and some vacation days and I want to take you away—from all the rat race of hide-and-go-seek in the evening backyards and Laundry Day and Morning Chores. Let’s go up to western Minnesota, you and me.  I think the drive is only 7 hours, but it’s really 8. With all our stopping and getting mixed up, the entire trip is 9. And for the first three hours, when one of you has to pee so desperately, twice, I think about turning around, think I don’t really have to do this. We could spend a happy few days at home, emptying the dishwasher and doing laundry and summer math facts and driving to the lake. But when we’re home, it’s so hard to break each of us from what pulls us most powerfully. My email account. Your smart phones. Your singular love for the 3-year-old neighbor boy.

Auntie Nay and Tiny piggy-backing

So here we are in a small town of 1,900, and when we drove in I felt myself relax. Felt we could just hunker down with the Boy's* family, now our adopted family, and walk the barely trafficked streets, run on the empty high school track, wave at neighbors, play at the playground, swim, beach. Of course, two of you can’t get through the day without a Minecraft marathon (curses on Minecraft!), but that’s okay; it gives me time with Tiny who, after a good nap, has turned so charming and sweet again and in love with her cousins and their dogs and her auntie.

Tiny, Cash, and Ruby

Life seems so simple here, if expensive. Auntie Nay says the groceries cost way more than what they cost us back home. There’s a Walmart and a Hy-Vee about an hour away, and that’s it. People here are farmers or teachers or doctors and some of them are out of work, and it’s calm and quiet except for when the St. John church bells ring at 5 p.m. for Saturday evening mass.

And now, I’m sitting on the bed at dusk next to Tiny as she whispers the words to "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" and fingers the movements in the warm, sticky air above her head until she pauses and leans over, still whispering, “Mom, my arm is tired. My arm is tired.”

“Okay. Well. Let it sleep.” I whisper back, and she receives this without comment and moves her fingers to tickling her belly. 

Dinner by sunlight.

In some ways, all our arms have gotten tired from holding up the routine. So then, we should let them sleep these few days before we face school registration and work and the Daily Grind.

Also, I just love you more and better when we pause all that other stuff so we can just be. Let’s always remember to do that. You’re getting so old and, I fear, drawing away each in your own little ways. This is normal, but sometimes we get so far apart that when I look at you this week I see both desire and uncertainty in one of your little faces; you’re wanting to get close like you were when you held my hand voluntarily everywhere we walked, but you don’t know how to get there without doing that.

After our visit, we stop in Minneapolis to see more cousins and that giant mall "of America." While driving through one of the many tiny country towns, I exclaim, “Look, here’s a town that’s ten seconds long! If you blink, you might miss it.” And you older ones unwrap the earbuds from around your ears and stare. “Whooa.”

Oldest, Middle, and cousins

There was a time when I had so much time that I walked hours daily to fill it. Around and across neighborhoods in all seasons of the year, I noticed things like rusty cars, children whining on the sidewalk, a dog sniffing near a ravine in the park. With all my modern-day efficiency strategies, all the smarts of smartphones, I’ve thought I’ve done myself a favor by filling up the time. I've been Getting More Stuff Done, so much that I’ve forgotten to be and notice as much as I've wanted to. And I haven’t helped you practice those things as much either.

“Mama,” Tiny says from her carseat as we exit the town. “I blinked but I didn’t miss it!”

I think, then, that there is still hope for us, despite all the blinking we do--for connecting, for paying attention, for being. And we can start now with this road and with this trip--with the shanty towns, the speckled cows, the chilled blue water of the community pool, and the street lined with toads that jump frantically out of our path. Let's do our best not to miss too much.

*The story about the Boy and how I adopted his family can be found here. 

Dear Desert Dweller, (Epistolary Wednesday), July 30

On Wednesdays, I write letters.

Dear Desert Dweller,

It’s dusty and hot here, I know. And sometimes we wonder, in the desert, if we’ll die before the next rain, the next bottle of water, the next splash in a puddle. It seems though, that there is, eventually, a next rain, a next water. But sometimes, like the Israelite’s manna it’s just enough to barely get us by.

In the meantime, so much beauty flourishes where it's so dry. Like the work of the L.A. Dream Center—in the middle of poverty and homelessness, there’re a million pounds of food (that’s 16 semi trucks) going out to in-need neighborhoods where young mothers and trembling old men fill their carts-with-wheels full of cherries, avocados, whole wheat pasta, and organic apples. Every week to the same neighborhoods all over the city.

Here, in the desert, women go every Thursday afternoon to a park in the projects (and on other afternoons to other parks) for Kidz Club. They sit in the baking sun, throw water balloons, hug children and tell them there are no limits on their lives or to their names. They are there every Thursday and the kids come to expect them. These women remember their names. This is the water.

In the yards in the projects, where the many mamas tend actual green in the heat of their children’s neediness, there are so many signs of life.

There are always signs of life in the desert. Promise comes in hues of orange and gold. And, wouldn’t you know it, some of the most glorious things grow when the sky is blue-bare and cloudless.

Most of us don’t pick the desert. Instead, it chooses us, claiming us for seasons and, sometimes, for what feels like forever. But, there are streams to be found, there are flash floods to fall. Watch and see what grows out of loneliness and loss. Watch and see what flourishes where there is no abundance, where you strain toward heaven with questions unanswered, wondering, waiting and thirsty. Something will spring up. It has to.

The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom; it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy...Strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way; say to those with fearful hearts, "Be strong, do not fear; your God will come, he will come with vengeance; with divine retribution he will come to save you." Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert. The burning sand will become a pool, the thirsty ground bubbling springs. In the haunts where jackals once lay, grass and reeds and papyrus will grow.

Isaiah 35:1-2, 5-7

Dear Burden Bearer, (Epistolary Wednesday) July 23

It's Wednesday, and I'm writing letters.

Dear Burden Bearer,

Perhaps you didn't realize this was you when you shed the silent (or not-so-silent) tear, when you curled your fingers into fists when you heard the news, got the call, read the email. It was you when you lit the candle, took a meal, baked bread, sent a card, updated your Facebook status with news that wasn't about you. It's someone else's tragedy, but oh it feels like yours. Oh, it feels like it belongs to the whole community somehow. The suffering and loss in our midst last week was taken up by so many--untold numbers, strangers to the family asking me if I knew how they could take meals, if I had an address, if I had service details. My Facebook page blew up with shares and links and prayers.

We want to make things right when tragedy strikes, and there's a ferocity that accompanies such desire for many of us. I see it in my father's wife who will bake a blueberry pie when she hears that one of the grandkids has a fever and sore throat. We can blame this ferocity for all the meal train frenzies and phone calls when there's been a Situation. We must do something. We have to do something with these burdens, don't we? We passionately tell ourselves in the hours and days of tragedy's aftermath: We can, sure as hell, lose some sleep, keep vigil, light a candle, cook a meal, send a card, network, make phone calls, send texts. We can, sure as hell, pray. And we're telling ourselves the truth. And we're drawn toward different remedies, you and I, all helpful in their own ways. My way, last week, was to humbly gather a group of women around the bed of a precious little girl, a mother's baby, a girl who at times felt like all-of-us-mothers' baby, who had only a few more hours left on life support.

This work of burden bearing is manageable when we do it together. We can, together, try to assuage a family's grief with meals, cards, prayers, thoughts, hugs. But alone? Alone it is almost unbearable, this burden of tragedy. With four women and two distraught parents, we could stand beside the bed of one so small and cry and pray and sing with them in such a way that heaven seemed very close to us, touching us on the ear. We could bend our necks and lean in, straining for its sound. It's the same with the meals and the cards and the simple Showing Up, each instance a physical reminder that Heaven Sees and Heaven Weeps.

There are times I'm so saturated with news of tragedy that I become numb to it. Small losses far away aren't always registered fully in our psyches. But those tragedies on a larger scale (the Newtown shooting, 9/11, the 300 Nigerian daughters kidnapped and auctioned off as sex slaves under the guise of "marriage")--it's like we can't help but pick them up, you and I. And when the family on the other side of town loses a child, when the first-grader in the next school district over loses a mother, when we've prayed alongside family and community for hours while we wait for a brain or heart to liven again and it doesn't, we can't help but bear witness to these losses because, now, we own them.

I'm so glad to have you. I'm glad the Miller family has you. Carrying a burden alone is the work of the courageous and lonely. Bearing them together is the work of the comforters and balm to the comforted.

And here's what I'm thinking for us, our community of Burden Bearers: Let's get even better at going the distance over the months and years for those in the wake of tragedy. That have-to-do-something ferocity wanes sometimes after the ground, once all strewn with debris, is cleaned up after the storm. Let's continue to demonstrate that We Remember on birthdays and anniversaries and would-have-been high school graduations. I'm not so good at that myself, and sometimes I'm just too plain scared at the possibility of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, creating more pain. But I suspect it's as simple as mentioning a memory or an inside joke or even just the loved-one's name. Maybe it looks like giving space for the memories and questions of the grieving to be voiced and responded to. Maybe it looks like--twelve months from now, two years from now--offering an ear in the grocery store aisle or in a shades-drawn living room or in the middle of a dark night.

At any rate, let's keep finding out.

Dear Modesty, (Epistolary Wednesday)

On Wednesdays, I write letters.

Dear Modesty,

I’m not sure how to speak of you these days. No one seems to agree on what exactly you are, calling you out in varying situations as if you are a chameleon, changing to suit your surroundings. You’re covered ankles in Bangladesh or covered cleavage in Iowa church services or skirts-to-the-knees at a choir concert or a two-piece swimsuit at the local pool. Different things to different people. Yet, I call you conundrum. Are you state-of-mind or state-of-dress? Or both? Is that you, sauntering off in a floor-length maxi skirt and a braggy ‘tude? Or is that you, innocent and unself-conscious in a bikini?

I can’t help but feel that it’s more state-of-mind (the wearer’s and the beholder’s) than it is state of dress. And yet, how do I explain why I won’t let my daughters wear the shorts with the 1-inch inseam and the teeny bikini with the fringe hanging down from the top?  (All of their friends have bikinis and wear short shorts. All of them, they tell me. They’re social pariahs in tankinis and one-pieces.) And it's hard to explain my "no" without sounding like I'm problematizing their bodies or their motives by saying they’ve joined forces with your nemesis (Immodesty). And, I refuse to denigrate the boys by suggesting they have no capacity for non-objectifying thought.

I’m just left with my own unequivocal discomfort and the fact that I just don’t want to see them that naked. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, Modesty.

 

I mean, we’ve spent all these years keeping them covered, from infancy until tweendom, protecting their soft delicate skins, dressing them in coordinated colors and cotton fabrics that evidenced our care, our investment in their soundness and their put-togetherness in the world. What’s it mean now, to string on a bikini top—a skinny bit of fabric that might pop down or up or untie or get caught and leave them exposed and vulnerable. And those shorts—those shorts—how could they possibly even be comfortable, those shorts whose sides stop at the crotch? No. Make them sit in those? Make them ride their bikes in those?

My daughters need a better barrier between their private parts and the outside world. For comfort’s sake. For the sake of all things safe and reasonable.

But in your name, Modesty, so many call prideful what is not. So many shame what is innocent. Of course I don’t want my daughters strutting around with a vendetta to get checked out like some rotating display at the department store. But that’s not them. I have a hard time believing it ever will be. And if it is, let’s make a deal: I will mention you then. I will remind them that Bragging to Get Attention is sort of the litmus test for an insecure human being, and are they really that insecure? And, aren’t there better ways to go about gaining self-confidence?

But generally, I think I’m going to leave you out of the conversation. How does one judge the thoughts and attitudes of the heart? My girls want a bikini because they’re cute and because their friends have them. Materialistic they may be. Immodest they are not.

Dear Boy, (Epistolary Wednesday)

On Wednesdays, I write letters...

Dear Boy,

Your wife has remarried. I officiated the wedding.

You’ve been gone six years this month* and it was time, it was time a long time ago, for her to move forward from the chaos of sudden widowhood-while-mothering-an-infant. You left so quickly, at such a terrible moment. And in that family, for all who were close to you--but particularly for her, I imagine--your leaving was like a tornado spiraling through the neighborhood, ripping tree trunks from the ground, lifting houses off their foundations and plopping them down again, askew. It takes so long to make those things right again, and some things, like the trees, never are. Of course, if they fall in the right season, full of seed, they will produce new trees, young and green but not so mighty all at once.

She was full of life, your bride. Full of energy, radiating glory on the wedding day: blue hair extensions, a silver circlet on her head, an excess of pearls and silver jewelry and tattooed sleeves that were artsy and gutsy and not gaudy.

You would have loved her. 

Also, your daughter. She was so tired by the end of the day, flopping about in a white flower girl dress, her dark tresses all aflutter, as she threw her body against her cousins on the dance floor as if to rest against them while the DJ played “Rockin’ Robin.”

She is so much her-mother-and-you.

You would have loved her, too.

Old enough to be aware but perhaps not present to all of its significance, someday she may look back on the white-gowned ceremony as the day her family became complete (because she can’t remember when it was complete before), with stepbrothers and stepsister who adore her, with a stepfather who does the same.

You would love them too, I think. 

He is a good man, this stepfather. His way with children is sweeter and more present than the way of most dads I know. And I trust she will find solace there.

But.

I do miss your way of being in the world, brother. And when they cut that cake, I couldn’t stop myself from flashing on your wedding-cake-smashing eight years ago. Your absence was so loud that your sister and I couldn’t help but hear it. 

My heart was heaven-centered on the day after the wedding, and in these days after our Gramps has died.

And so torn between the dead and the living.

I wonder--where you are—is the tearing less severe? Or is it all the same?

*Want to know the rest of the story? You can read more about me and the Boy here: